Shepherd Wizard

Side Story 9 - Turan Zahar (4)

It was the dead of night, the moon dimly risen, when Meisa Aravion opened her eyes.

Groaning from a strange headache, she soon realized that she was bound with something like rope, and that around her several Zahar nobles, draped in cloaks and wearing masks, lay sleeping.

One of them, awake to keep watch, looked at Meisa and spoke.

"You're awake."

Meisa felt that the man's voice was oddly familiar.

She should never in her life have had occasion to hear a Zahar noble's voice, so why?

Along with the thought, what had happened just before she lost consciousness came back to her.

The desperate fight against the Necromancer King, the temporary blackout brought on by the depletion of her Magic Power, and the ash-haired man who, when she opened her eyes, had pressed his mouth to hers and pushed something solid in with his tongue......

"You, how dare–"

"Quiet. Everyone's asleep; kicking up a racket isn't exactly polite."

Whether her face flushed with shame and rage or not, the man said this and calmly raised his index finger to the mouth of his mask.

She moved at once to draw up her Magic Power and scorch him to ash, but in that instant Meisa realized there was not a shred of Magic Power left in her body.

'This is......'

It seemed a Magic Artifact that scattered Magic Power had been fitted somewhere on her body.

Most likely it was this collar, shaped like a Restraint Device, clamped tight and stifling around her neck.

Ordinarily such a thing could hardly suppress the power of a top-tier Wizard like her, but if put on while her Magic Power was wholly exhausted, or worn for a long stretch of time, it could no longer be undone by force.

When Meisa, realizing she was in no state to resist, fell silent, the man across from her spoke up.

"Meisa Aravion, right?"

Perhaps because of his calm tone, the question sounded less like an interrogation than a simple confirmation of fact.

Not that there would be two Wizards with Magic Power like hers and a body as gaunt and bony, so it was a question that hardly needed asking.

"That's right."

"From now on you're our prisoner. Cooperate quietly and I promise there'll be no violence."

"Are you in any position to promise that?"

"I'm Turan Zahar. My father is the Family Head of Zahar."

The nobles of House Zahar tended to guard information with a paranoia unmatched by other houses.

Solif, heir of Varaha, which came relatively close to an ally, had at least caught rumors of Turan's existence, but Meisa had no way of knowing he existed.

Still, figuring a Zahar noble surely wouldn't go so far as to impersonate the Family Head's child, she nodded.

"......Fine. So, what do you plan to do with me?"

"That's for my father to decide. We're taking you to the Red Fortress. My job ends there."

The Red Fortress.

To the nobles of Aravion it was regarded as something like a den of demons.

Just as Meisa parted her lips to say something, a small groan came from behind.

"Mmh, what's going on......?"

"Nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep."

The Zahar noble, who had cracked his eyes open half-asleep at their conversation, shut them again.

When Turan urged an answer with a jerk of his chin, Meisa eventually nodded slowly.

"Right, that'd be better, I suppose."

When she really thought about it, it seemed it would be no different from being shut away in that nightmare of a house.

Even if she was dragged off, the most it could come to was death.

Thinking that to herself, Meisa voiced a question that suddenly occurred to her.

"But somehow I feel better than before......"

"Because we fed you."

"Surely not?"

When she glared, recalling that forced kiss from before, Turan gave a light shake of his head.

"That was because you looked like you'd drop dead any second, and I used a more efficient method this time, so you needn't worry. I'd just as soon pass on kissing a woman like you myself."

What Turan drew out and showed her was a long, thin metal tube.

At his explanation that he had driven it down her throat to push food in, Meisa, realizing food had gone into her stomach, darkened in the face.

The nausea she had grown used to, though not as bad as back then, seemed to well up slowly.

"Throw up again and I'll make you eat it back down, understand."

At the sharp threat she gritted her teeth, straining to settle her churning stomach.

The man in front of her was clearly someone who would actually do it.

*

Early the next morning, the Zahar nobles marveled at the news that Meisa, even having grasped her situation, had resigned herself to being a prisoner.

Because they had assumed that the heir of Aravion, of all people, would naturally thrash and struggle to escape by any means.

Since Turan was the only one among the Zahar nobles present who could smell emotion, they all asked for his opinion.

"What do you think, it's not a trick, is it?"

"As far as I can tell, no. Still, just in case, don't take your eyes off her."

"Got it."

After exchanging a few words, they set off again, moving swiftly toward Axum.

Turan took on the task of riding with the collared Meisa, since the wolf Magical Beast he rode was the largest and strongest of them all.

How long had they ridden on in silence like that?

It was Turan who spoke to her first.

"Got some kind of blood feud with the Dark Elves?"

"What?"

"From the way you fought, it didn't look like something you were doing out of mere duty."

Unlike the other Aravion Wizards, there was malice visible in Meisa's attacks as she cut down the Dark Elves.

Searing them inefficiently to torture them, or hacking off their limbs and leaving them to writhe.

At the sudden question Meisa was silent for a long while before answering.

"Because family of mine died."

"Family?"

"My sixth cousin."

There was no need to explain that she was all but isolated within her house, and that for this reason Ashiz Berk, who had lost his life to the Dark Elves during the recent Pilgrimage, was family as precious to her as a true sibling.

Could a cold-blooded Zahar noble possibly understand such a thing.

That she had not fled the final battle but thrown everything she had against the Necromancer King and the other Necromancers was itself half an act of self-abandonment.

Half a self-destructive instinct that said it would be fine to just die fighting, half a thirst for vengeance that meant to get revenge no matter what.

"My condolences."

"What?"

"I said my condolences. Hostile though we may be, a Wizard dying at the hands of another race is something to be mourned."

After saying this, Turan paused for a moment, then confided in a low voice.

"Besides, when you get down to it, I'm not exactly a stranger to Aravion myself."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I told you earlier I'm the Family Head's son, but the truth is I'm not his blood son, I'm his Adopted Son."

"Then......"

"Whether I'm the heir? No, I'm not made of the right stuff for that. Sadly."

In a Wizard house, the Family Head's Adopted Son meant the heir.

While she puzzled over words she couldn't understand, Turan went on explaining in a somewhat forlorn tone.

"My birth father was a Zahar noble who died in the Aravion war, and my birth mother was a flower of Aravion who'd been abducted. So it's just that your people don't feel entirely like strangers to me. Don't tell the others."

The unexpectedly gentle voice threw Meisa's heart into confusion.

To think that someone whose first impression had been the very picture of a ruthless Zahar noble would suddenly show such a tender side.

Meisa stayed silent for a long while, then gave a short "all right".

At this Turan, his face hidden behind the mask where she couldn't see it, drew a contemptible smile.

'Good, she took the bait.'

It had been an attempt to form some degree of bond, partly to keep her from trying to flee along the way and partly to draw information out of her, and it seemed to have worked even better than expected.

Everything, her manner of speech, her expression, even the emotion wafting off her scent, told him that the psychological distance Meisa felt toward him had narrowed.

For his father's sake, he could turn even something like his own birth, which might be called a weakness, into a weapon as readily as he pleased.

This too was thanks to Talis's teachings.

From then on as well he kept up a considerate attitude, knocking Meisa out before feeding her, having one of the women among the accompanying Zahar nobles wash her body, and letting her change into clean clothes several times.

A few of the others along for the journey grumbled, discontented at the sight.

"Aren't we treating her too gently? Honestly, for the heir of those sparrows, breaking all four of her limbs and dragging her off still wouldn't be enough......"

"Do that and she might die on the way. We didn't bring a healer, either. Let her go along quietly while she still can. She'll taste hell soon enough once we arrive."

Though Turan reined them in like this, they let their ill will toward Meisa show now and then.

A good many of them belonged to the generation that had fought in the war with Aravion, so it was only natural.

As a result Meisa had no choice but to lean on Turan, the only one not hostile toward her and the one with whom a measure of rapport had formed.

His good looks, shallow a thing as it was, helped a great deal too.

As the distance between them gradually closed, Meisa little by little opened up to Turan about this and that.

From the poisoning of her mother and younger brother in her childhood, to the unidentified Zahar noble who attacked and tormented her within the house, to the elders of the house who, rather than properly protecting her, treated her like a madwoman and sought to persecute her.

Though these were things she had not told even her own family, she could pour them out easily to this young man who catered to her every whim.

"You don't happen to know anything?"

"Not a thing. If something like that were going on, maybe it's a prisoner being put to work somewhere inside Aravion......"

At the story that a Zahar noble was secretly operating within the Aravion main house, Turan inwardly thought she was suffering from persecutory delusions, but outwardly he pretended to go along with it.

Was it because she had met, for the first time, someone who believed her?

Meisa quickly turned her face away, but Turan did not miss the moisture gathering at the corners of her eyes.

In any case, information was something that had to be exchanged.

As much as she unspooled her information, Turan unspooled more of his own story in turn, and so the two came to learn a great deal about each other.

"You're only eighteen now?"

"That's right."

"I thought you just had a young-looking face......"

Meisa was perceptive enough to tell that Turan was the leader of the Zahar nobles gathered here.

Given the age difference, the others all treated him with a degree of easy familiarity.

Adopted Son of the Family Head though he might be, it would have been impossible without magical ability of his own.

"I'm fairly capable in my own right, you see."

"Yeah?"

"Want me to show you?"

The magical skill Turan displayed was enough to captivate Meisa.

Gazing blankly at the intricate patterns of flame embroidering the air, she let out a cry of wonder.

"Wow...... I feel like I could do it too, if maybe this collar could come off just for a moment–"

"Absolutely not."

"What a shame."

At the sight of Meisa grumbling that he wouldn't take it off, Turan burst into a hearty laugh.

Looking less like a kidnapper and his captive than like two friends of the same age, the pair drew bewildered looks from the other Zahar nobles nearby.

After several weeks like this, having entered the Enril Desert, they cast off their cumbersome masks and cloaks and, as Zahar nobles, stopped at the cities built along the old empire's highways, where they received lavish treatment.

The heads of the Vassal Houses, receiving the Family Head's Adopted Son, naturally bowed low before him.

"But that one over there......"

"There's no need to mind her. She doesn't require any meals, either."

"Ah, yes sir."

Naturally, no small number questioned Meisa's presence, but surprisingly none recognized who she was, for the continued feeding had changed her appearance considerably from before.

She was still bone-thin, but now she had taken on enough of a figure that one could tell she was a woman, and her face, though gaunt, had grown fairly presentable.

'Couldn't call her a skeleton anymore.'

Thinking inwardly that at least she was no longer so bad that kissing her made him gag, Turan quietly regarded the woman he had spent these several weeks alongside.

The narrowing of the heart's distance over the time that had passed was not Meisa's story alone.

Listening to her story, experiencing the life she had lived secondhand, Turan found himself unable to regard Meisa as a stranger.

Unlike Talis, who had taught him how to use and manipulate others, Turan was not the sort who could, without remorse, betray someone he had deliberately let inside his fence and won the trust of.

'She's a weak woman.'

In terms of sheer magical ability alone she was far superior to Turan, but her character was soft beyond measure.

A young lady who, all her life, had never decided a single thing for herself and had only ever been dragged about by others.

She could be called the very opposite of Turan, who had been taught by Talis that he must keep everything under his own control.

And yet why was it that every time he saw that frail side of her, his chest ached for no good reason?

As though he wanted to cherish a small animal incapable of protecting itself.

In the middle of turning such thoughts over in his mind while they talked quietly, Meisa suddenly opened her mouth heavily.

"Hey, Turan."

"What?"

"When we get to Axum, will I... die?"

Turan could not answer that question.

Her fate rested entirely on the will of Haroon Zahar.

Only, to his mind, his father probably wouldn't kill Meisa outright.

The advantages to be gained by keeping her alive and using her to coax Aravion overflowed even from the brief thought he gave it.

'Even if she's only used as a broodmare, that's better than killing her, at the very least.'

Being a woman born with talent overwhelming even that of Zahar's heir candidates, her children too would surely possess outstanding talent.

Since it would amount to bloodline theft, if a child were made and it inherited the Aravion Bloodline it would have to be killed, but if it inherited the Zahar Bloodline it could be raised as a member of the house.

Thinking this, Turan felt an unaccountable displeasure rise up in him.

Considering that they would need to produce a powerful child, the task of impregnating Meisa would probably fall to Rahmann or Ferga.

Just imagining it made his insides boil and seethe.

'Should I let her go?'

If he secretly sent Meisa back from here, she wouldn't die, nor would she end up the broodmare of some Zahar noble other than himself.

As for the punishment for it, since he was the one who had earned the merit of capturing her in the first place, it would amount to a heavy reprimand at most.

Turan forced down the impulse that had abruptly welled up in him.

Because doing so would disappoint his father.

The greatest of fathers, who loved him more than anyone in the world, and whom he loved......

Swallowing down the unexpected emotion, he soothed Meisa with a kindly face.

"It'll be fine. I believe my father won't kill you so easily."

*

After passing through several more cities, they at last returned to Axum, the capital of Zahar.

Having put Meisa into one of its more luxurious cells, Turan headed straight for the house's great council chamber with his companions.

"We have completed the mission and returned, Family Head-nim."

"Well done."

Haroon, Talis, and the other senior figures of Zahar received the mission report from their seats.

Their expressions shifted in all manner of ways as they read the report compiling the number of Dark Elves involved in the incident, the damage it had caused, and the manpower and losses Aravion had committed to this subjugation.

"Meisa Aravion? The heir of the sparrows?"

"Hah, you captured the heir as a prisoner, you say......?"

"A rather different appearance from what I'd heard."

Turan furrowed his brow at the expressions of Haroon, Talis, and the other key figures.

Unlike those who were surprised yet pleased, their faces showed, plainly, more bafflement than joy.

'Why?'

No matter how he thought about it, there was no reason that abducting the heir of Aravion should warrant a reaction like that.

With most of the elite of their subjugation force wiped out and their heir, a formidable asset, lost as well, Aravion would not start another war unless they had gone mad, and if they did, that would be the very day of Aravion's destruction.

"Hmm, this will take some thinking over. In any case, well done. Disperse and rest. We'll discuss the evaluation of this affair at a later time."

"Yes, sir."

After the meeting broke up, Turan went straight to Haroon and Talis.

The faces that greeted him still carried a look of discomfort and a faint anger.

"Father. Uncle."

"Turan."

"You've come."

"Has what I did this time done harm to the house, by any chance?"

At the blunt, direct question the two men glanced back and forth at each other.

"It's not that, exactly, but it would be hard to deny that a bit of a problem has arisen."

"Why is that?"

"That is not something you're permitted to know yet."

At Talis's words Turan desperately held back the scowl that threatened to form on his face.

Because he knew where this attitude came from.

Within House Zahar there existed an inner group, a handful of people who kept deeper secrets.

So exclusive was it that not even the three candidates for Family Head belonged, which made even its selection criteria hard to discern.

Talis's attitude now was the same as when he had told Turan to stop whenever Turan tried to dig into who they were.

In his experience, the two of them had never given a satisfying answer on the matter.

"Understood. Then...... what becomes of the woman?"

"As it happens, that's just what we meant to discuss."

Haroon let out a low hum, paused for a moment, then said to Turan,

"It seems we'll have to release her in secret, after all. Could you handle that task? Keeping it from the others, of course."

"Release her?"

Never having dreamed that the very thing he had wished for would come to pass like this, Turan wore a dazed expression for a moment.

Interpreting this as bewilderment, Haroon cleared his throat lightly and explained.

"The details are difficult to go into, but the heir of Aravion stands in a far more delicate position than you'd think. It would be hard for me or Talis to move on this directly, so I'd like you to take it on–"

"My father's will is my own."

At Turan's eager reply, the troubled face of Haroon brightened.

"That's a relief."

Just then, Turan recalled, alongside the two men's intent to release Meisa, the story he had heard before.

The claim that a Zahar noble was operating in secret within Aravion's home base.

Connecting the two, something flashed into his mind.

"Father. Uncle."

"Hm?"

"What is it?"

"Is it possible that the upper echelons of Aravion and Zahar are in some kind of communication with each other?"

From the unguarded reactions of Haroon and Talis alone, Turan could tell that his guess was correct.

Both were men accustomed to never showing what they thought, but they had been struck by so unexpected a blow that they failed to manage their expressions and emotions.

"Why... do you think that?"

"The heir of Aravion told me so. That a Zahar noble is hiding in their home base."

He had thought it nonsense, wondering why Aravion's upper ranks would leave such a thing alone, but seeing these two react, it was clear there had been some arrangement between the sides from the start.

Otherwise, there was no way they would simply let prey like this go.

"Hm, Turan?"

"Yes, Father."

"It seems we'll need to have a more in-depth talk about that later. Now isn't a good time."

"I was just curious, that's all. For now I'll see the mission through first."

"Yes. You do that. It seems there's a great deal we'll have to tell you."

*

That evening, Turan, draped in the mask and cloak distinctive to Zahar nobles, approached the prison in secret.

Since the Light Orbs, which should normally have been lit as a precaution against Concealment magic, had been switched off all along a particular route, he was able to approach without interference from anyone.

When he reached the entrance and lifted his Concealment, the two Knights standing guard before it saw him and snapped to attention.

They couldn't know why he had come in the dead of night, but from his Concealment ability it was clear he was a Zahar noble.

"Glory to Zahar!"

"Working hard, I see. Just a moment–"

Lowering his voice on purpose to hide his identity, Turan approached slowly, then swiftly threw out his fists, knocked them unconscious, and stepped inside.

Already knowing the interior's security system inside and out, he was able to reach the cell where Meisa was held, in the deepest part, in an instant.

"Meisa."

"Turan?"

"Come here."

Inside the fairly luxurious cell, prepared as it was for an heir, Meisa, who had been sitting quietly reading a book, was startled by the appearance of someone she hadn't expected, yet came obediently toward the door.

Opening the door with the key he had brought, Turan at once seized the Magic Power Seal Restraint Device fastened around her neck and tore it off with his hand.

As the immense power that had been absent for over a month came surging back through her body, Meisa stared at him with startled eyes.

"Wh-what on earth is this......?"

"Go back to Aravion now. The guards outside are unconscious, so don't bother touching them. If you fly fast, they won't be able to chase you."

"Is this really all right? Surely this isn't the will of Zahar–"

Turan, of course, shook his head in denial.

That Zahar's upper echelons would release the Aravion heir they had gone to such trouble to capture had to remain a secret.

"Then, if I run, what about you?"

"No one knows I let you go."

At his answer, that she therefore had nothing to worry about, Meisa chewed and chewed at her lip before replying.

"I'm not going back to my house."

"What? And do what if you don't go back?"

What kind of madness is this, he thought, but only for a moment, before Turan soon arrived at the conclusion that it made sense.

If what she had said earlier that day was true, then the torment she had suffered within her house was not her own paranoid delusion but the truth.

Just then, Meisa stepped up to Turan, grabbed a fistful of his hair, and kissed him.

Clinging and wet, the way it had been when food was passed between them before.

Perhaps thanks to a body grown sturdier than before from the nourishment, and to her formidable Magic Power, her strength was great enough that he couldn't easily pull free.

After several seconds, dozens of seconds, perhaps even longer than that.

Meisa, slowly drawing her mouth away, swept the cell she had been held in over with fire at a gesture of her hand.

It wasn't hard to guess that this was to destroy any medium that could be used for Tracking Magic.

"If I give you my hair, you can find me with Tracking Magic, can't you?"

When Turan nodded, she promptly cut off a fistful of her own red hair and laid it in his hand.

"I'll leave you this, so someday come find me. I'll be waiting."

Whether he never came for her in his whole life, or whether he brought the house's Wizards to come capture her, either was fine.

Meisa said this in a low voice, then walked right out of the prison.

Turan gazed at the red hair left in his hand, then carefully slipped it into his pocket.

*****

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